I saw an ad for this Fareed Zakaria special on Taiwan, but I wasn't able to see it when it was on CNN, so I'm recording it and will watch it later.
外 not
half-formed thoughts, occasional rants, and muttered sarcastic asides
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Need to watch: Fareed Zakaria's CNN special about "Taiwan: Unfinished Business"
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Two new books in the former native speaker's library
University of Hawai'i Press has a clearance sale going, so I bought two books--I think they were a dollar each:
- Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning, by J. Marshall Unger
- Family Catastrophe, by Wang Wen-hsing (translated by Susan Wan Dolling)
Saturday, February 03, 2024
Three new books in the former native speaker's library
Not much to say about these yet because I'm still buried in reading student work, last semester's "sabbatical" a distant bittersweet memory...
- Memories of the Japanese Empire: Comparison of the Colonial and Decolonisation Experiences in Taiwan and Nan’yo-gunto, ed. Yuko Mio (2023)
- The Meiji Japanese Who Made Modern Taiwan, by Toshio Watanabe (trans. Robert D. Eldridge) (2023)
- Words Like Colored Glass: The Role Of The Press In Taiwan's Democratization Process, by Daniel K Berman (1992)
Saturday, January 20, 2024
A video about the history of trains in Taiwan
Think I'll watch this when I get a chance. I tried to get my son the train fanatic to watch this with me, but he lost interest because I couldn't translate it fast enough...
Friday, January 05, 2024
Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website
"Sabbatical" review
Books read since the end of last spring semester (links are to my posts on the books--I didn't post on everything I read):
- Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, eds. Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong
- Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, eds. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks
- Xiaoye You, Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China
- Scott E. Simon, Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa
- Richard Madsen, Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan
- Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940
- Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication
- Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader
- Darryl Sterk, trans. Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Lōa Hô
- A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism
- Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】
- Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration
- Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation
- Wendy Cheng, Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism
Monday, January 01, 2024
First "new book in the former native speaker's library" post of 2024!
This afternoon, I went to the neighborhood 7-Eleven and picked up a book I ordered yesterday from the 博客來 website: it's called 《島國知音:台灣問題專家葛超智其人其事》(An Island Nation's Close Friend: Taiwan Expert George H. Kerr's Life and Experiences). It's a translation of 《沖縄と台湾を愛した ジョージ・H・カー先生の思い出》, which was published in 2018. I have a copy of the Japanese book, but I can't read it, so I was excited when I found out a Chinese translation had been published.
The book is a collection of essays about George H. Kerr by people who knew him (like Kabira Tomokiyo 川平朝清 and Higa Mikio 比嘉幹郎) and people who have studied his life and work (like Su Yao-tsung 蘇瑤崇 and Yoshihara Yukari 吉原ゆかり). It looks like it'll be a good book to read on the flight home!
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Some new books in the former native speaker's library
We took a short trip to Taiwan during winter break, and though most of our time was spent visiting family and friends after not having been here in five years (!), I did manage to pop into a couple of bookstores. Unfortunately, I didn't really plan well for my book shopping--I went to Southern Materials Center (南天書局) when we were in Taipei, and I was overwhelmed! I spend a few hours just looking for books, but nothing was clicking for some reason (or perhaps everything was clicking). When they were nearing closing time, I finally chose five of the books that I had been looking at, almost at random:
- Taiwan's 400 Year History, anniversary edition, by Su Beng. I had seen this on the Amazon website, but it was about $90. This cost NT$544 after the discount (about US$18!). This is the condensed English translation of 《台灣人四百年史》 by 史明.
- 《簡吉獄中日記》Chien Chi's Prison Diaries. I had read about Chien Chi in Shih-shan Henry Tsai's The Peasant Movement and Land Reform in Taiwan, 1924-1951, and I'm also interested in reading diaries, letters, etc., so this seemed like a good choice. This book covers the period from Dec. 20, 1929-Dec. 24, 1930. It has the Japanese original, a Chinese translation (fortunately for me!), and a reading guide by Chen Tz'u-yu (陳慈玉).
- 《走出閨房上學校》Leaving the Boudoir and Going to School, by Ts'ai Yuen-lung and Huang Ya-fang (蔡元隆、黃雅芳). As the subtitle indicates, this book is about girls' education in the Yunlin-Chia-I area during the Japanese colonial period.
- 《三代臺灣人》Three Generations of Taiwanese People, ed. by the Taiwan Research Fund (台灣研究基金會). This is a collection of scholarly papers from three conferences sponsored by the Research Fund, covering what they call the Chiang Wei-shui period, the Lee Teng-hui period, and the Tang-wai (黨外) period of Taiwan's history.
- 《臺灣民眾黨特刊,第一冊》The Taiwan People's Party Special Issue, Volume One. I'm not sure why I bought this little (tiny!) boxed collection of two books (a facsimile of the first volume and an appendix explaining the history of the (ahem) *original* Taiwan People's Party.
- 《看不見的文字:時代挑戰與一名布農祭司的回應》by Wang Wei-chih (王威智)
- 《臺灣民族性百談》by Yamane Yūzō (山根勇藏), trans. Liao I-cheng (廖怡錚). This is a 1930 Japanese book about Taiwan. There was a recent article about this book in the News Lens.